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Above:  Austrian Domino Art set up 3,000 dominoes for an advertisement in Indonesia. 

Domino art is fascinating not least because it shows elaborate feats of art and engineering, but also because you set it up to knock it down. Domino artists from around the world take part in domino shows with other people who love creating domino structures. They stand up domino ‘tiles’ of all colours in a carefully planned order, making exciting patterns. When the whole pattern or ‘image’ is ready, the first domino is knocked down. Only this first tile should be toppled by hand as the aim is for the rest to knock themselves down under what scientists might call ‘the domino effect’.

Mathias Ritter, software engineer, domino artist, and founder of Austrian Domino Art, designs and creates chain reactions featuring patterns, images, texts, and structures. His portfolio encompasses an impressive variety of domino shows, TV commercials and workshops, and clients include large corporations and global companies like Bombardier, Pizza Hut and Endemol.

From 1998 to 2009 there was a TV show called “Domino Day”, where a team of around 90 people set up big chain reactions with millions of dominoes to break world records. Inspired by this as a child, Mathias began buying and setting up a couple of dominoes. In 2008, he launched his YouTube channel and began uploading videos of his domino runs. The projects got bigger and bigger; eventually, they began to organise their own events, where they also set new world records, turning this hobby into a profession. Today, Austrian Domino Art offer domino art as a service to companies all around the world – whether it be for entertainment, advertisement, team building or other purposes. Often, they need more than two people to realise domino projects, so throughout the years they’ve got in touch with other artists, creating a world-wide network of around 40 domino artists. Together, they plan, design and realise the projects, all of which you can find over at domino.art.

 

Above: Austrian Domino Art setting up dominos in a penthouse in London – the penthouse was for sale.

How did the transition from hobby to professional domino artist take place? “We had the idea to turn this into a profession through an inquiry we received through our YouTube channel in 2013. It was from the Italian TV who asked us to create domino art for a TV show. From this point on, we started to actively offer our services to other companies through our homepage.”

We’ve achieved over 15 Guinness World Records titles related to chain reactions within the last years. For example, in 2016 we broke 3 world records in one domino show: 1. Most disc cases toppled in a domino fashion, 10,266 disc cases, 2. Largest stick bomb with 40,910 sticks and 3. Longest domino wall of 40.14 m (42,173 dominoes). 

Austrian Domino Art set these world records with a team of about 20 people from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. It took them all about 4 days to create the chain reaction. 

As for commercial work, Matthias says it’s definitely exciting and an honour that they are able to work with such big household names like Microsoft and Pizza Hut, and that he’s immensely proud that they are interested in their domino art services. The team also loves the fact that they can travel around the world while they set up domino projects – it’s the perfect way to earn money with something that started as a hobby and that they’re so passionate about. 

We hope that we can fascinate and inspire other people with our domino projects. It’s really cool that most people are amazed when they see dominoes topple, which is why they turn out to be perfect for advertisement or entertainment projects.

Matthias chose the .art for two key reasons. First of all, their company name is “Austrian Domino Art”, so the domain perfectly complemented this. Secondly, they define what they create as “domino art”: Domino Art is a form of creative self-expression in which dominoes are set up and knocked down to create appealing visual effects including patterns, artistic designs, images, text, structures, and other chain reactions. So, really, the web domain address was a no brainer!

You can find Austrain Domino Art’s full portfolio here: https://www.domino.art/